A Thousand Days in Tuscany by Marlena de Blasi

slant—quite beautiful and wish we could buy one. But the villagers prefer a condominium or an apartment in one of the pink and yellow cement-block palaces that wait in the lower town. No more carrying wood up the stairs and ashes back down the stairs. Just the diligent, passionless flames of a nice gas fire. They’re longing for built-in, plastic-finished closets rather than those cherry-woodarmoires, big and deep as caves. They want stainless-steel sinks rather than some marble tub worn to silk from matriarchal scrubbing; they want great, fake suns swaying from the ceilings instead of the rough, hand-wrought iron lanterns Biagiotti’s grandfather forged for the whole village a hundred years ago.
    As for i progressisti who still live in the countryside and farm the nobles’ lands, they ache to leave behind their rent-free, meter-thick-walled, freezing-eight-months-of-the-year houses, where once three and four generations of families lived together, each one doing for the others. But there are no more of these epic families. With the old ones dying and the young ones escaping, only the ones too old to escape and too young to die, only they, in that tethered, frozen range, remain.
    For some time now there’s been a paycheck every month for working the land, along with a very fair portion of the yields. So i progressisti say that surely they’re rich enough to buy their own piece of one of the pink and yellow palaces where their cell phones will have clear signals and where there are more outlets for television sets and fewer windows to wash. But it’s not just this lust for electronic amusement and straight, smooth walls that goads the progressives. The chafe is ancestral. “È la scoria della mezzadria. It’s the sludge left from the shareholding system,” Barlozzo is saying as Florì enters the piazza carrying a plate covered with a kitchen towel.
    She approaches us, tiptoeing, mouthing “scusatemi” as though she’s come late to the second act of Madame Butterfly. Barlozzo acknowledges her arrival by rising, taking the plate from her and putting it down on the stone wall beside our wine, kissing her hand, giving her his chair. Hardly missing a beat, he picks up with:
    “Ashamed they still sharecrop a nobleman’s fields, ashamed they still pay homage to him, take off their hats to him, they are resigned rather than proud to leave baskets of the best porcini and the fattest truffles by his great polished doors. A paycheck is too thin a gloss to paint over the history of a serf.”
    Knowing something wonderful waits under the towel, Fernando uncovers the plate, revealing what looks like a sweet but what turns out to be a round of salty, crusty pecorino bread. He cuts thin, very thin slices of the bread with the small knife Florì placed on the rim of the plate. She has paper napkins in her sweater pocket. Without taking her eyes from the duke, she pulls out the napkins, places one under each slice of bread as Fernando cuts it, passes it to each of us. This quiet diminishing of the bread by Fernando and his even softer distribution of it continues at well-paced intervals.
    “I tradizionalisti shake their heads. Some live in the village, some on the land, but not one of them will go to live in the pink and yellow palaces. They say life was better when it was harder. They say food tasted better laid down over hunger and that there’s nothingmore wonderful than watching every sunrise and every sunset. They say that working to the sweat, eating your share, sleeping a child’s sleep, is what life was meant to be. They say they don’t understand this avid bent to accumulate things you can’t eat or drink or wear or use to keep you warm. They remember when accumulation still meant gathering three sacks of chestnuts instead of two. They say their neighbors have lost the capacity to imagine and to feel—some of them, the capacity to love. They say since we all have everything and we all have nothing, our only task is